It has been almost a year since anything has been posted on here, and what a year it has been. With all the ups and downs, life continues for those of us still living.

In that year a lot of external work has been done by YSE which has unfortunately stumped the progress of internal projects that were in the pipeline. The Hijri Date project which was initiated at the start of 2005 has steadily gained momentum and was generally a success with many websites adopting the service and idea. This is reflected by the number hits to the server - This month alone over 90,000 hits shows that the include script is being used.

As usual, the 2007 trend graph shows a continual rise which is always a good thing!

Though this may look good, there is a lot of work that needs to be done and we hope that in the coming months we will be able to facilitate for the development of new projects as well as the continual improvement of those still running.

The Usayd Network has finally decided to do undergo a facelift and 100% optimisation. A large proportion of this has taken place with the shift from an old, unstable and clogged up WordPress install to a brand new setup. The theme is currently in development - focused on simple yet effective design technique.

So keep your eyes open

We have finally been able to launch the much anticipated Hijri Date wizard, which you can find here. Miraculously the webhost activated freetype support which gave way to our latest development on the Hijri Date project line.

Feedback is always valued, feel free to comment or email us at any time.

Visitors

The rise in visitors from 2005 -> 2006 was huge, with 2006 receiving an average of 2000 visitors per day which was on a continual rise until half way through October where there was a drop in activity from the company.

Bandwidth

YSE has been the basis for all major bandwidth consuming activity so its unsurprising that 250,000 MB were used in 2006, an increase of about 200% from 2005. Something in the average of 1GB transfer per day.

This leads on to the two major projects of 2006:

Downloads

The downloads section was introduced as an experimental project to test out just how useful having a file storage dump would be. It turns out that the idea was extremely successful, providing only 50 files we have had a massive 6000 downloads in 2006 alone, which comes to an average of 120 downloads per file.

Surprisingly the most popular download was the Advent T9 driver pack compiled by the Usayd Corporation, which boasted a huge 1600 downloads, almost a third of the total downloads with a full five star rating and has reached approximately the 14th most popular result for an Advent T9 google search.

As the downloads section was intentionally used to help people with HP iPaq RX3715 filestore issues, the second and third most popular files are ROM images for this device, and fourth is the Bluetooth headphones (AD2P) drivers.

In fifth place is the specialised Islamic Praise plugin by the Usayd Corporation, which has been quite popular for WordPress users. There are plans to further this project though the work is spread over a huge area. As the project is open source, any contributions whether financial or physical (programming etc.) would be gratefully accepted.

Hijri Date

This project was again rather experimental, however it has proven to have been the landmark for 2006. The Hijri Date service is currently used by thousands of websites internationally and has boasted a huge popularity. It is unfortunate that the Hijri Date wizard was actually finished back in April 06, however it has still not been made public due to hosting problems. The future is looking bright though!

Dedicated Hosting

The Usayd Corporation have been moving their sites over to dedicated hosting. This process has been slowed by a few issues however we are aiming for stable ground by February 2007.

We recommend Fuzzy Hosting for excellent hosting:

Keep your eyes open for some new developments in 2007!

We are happy to find that the HijriDate service is expanding over new platforms thanks to some induviduals from the online community.

Serendipity

Serendipity is another open source blogging platform. Abdussamad has written a tutorial and a script to adding the hijri date to blog entries on his website.

phpBB

phpBB is a very popular forum software that has been available for a very long time. Khurram has written a mod for phpBB which enables the hijri date to come alongside the gregorian date on the index page.

Thanks alot to these brothers and I hope that come in useful. They are available on the Hijri Date page.

Local testing helps immensely when working on a new project - why? Because you can test your script in seconds, and the best way to see if something works is to keep testing it. I’ve been using XAMPP with PHP5, Apache2 and MySQL5 on one of my Windows machines to get the job done. Alternatively if your running Linux or Mac then you (should) have these facilities only a few clicks away.

I also find that looking at other open source scripts can be extremely useful. You might know how to do something one way but you may find that someone else has done it in a more efficient and easier way then yourself. The great thing about open source is that you are no obliged to use someone elses scripts, and if you do use it then you are free to change it as much as you like to suit your needs (depending on what license it’s under).

Anyway back to the HijriDate Wizard. It has been completed and is working really well, but - yes there is a but. This webhost is not currently supporting ‘FreeType’. What does that mean? Well basically the script will not run on here. I have it running on an Usayd Networks server but I am not allowed to release it publicly till it can be hosted here. The script has been tested by around 25 people so far and the evaluation has been very positive. I’m afraid all I can offer to you right now is a screenshot of it in action, and I will keep emailing this pathetic webhost to enable FreeType.

• Font
• Font Size
• Font Colour
• Background Colour
• Transparent Background

Essentially all we really have left is to give the user the three standard options of HijriDate (Hijri + Gregorian), Hirji only and Gregorian only and the wizard. We are using the Vera font set from GNOME (open source) and eventually expanding to other open source font sets. Of course, here’s a demo for you:

Time to email Netfirms again…

Over the last two months we have been quite closely monitoring the usage of the HijriDate service and we have found that there is some interest in it. A large percentage of this month’s referrals seem to be coming from websites using the HijriDate service (although not enough of them are linking back!).

Progression

Since the first PHP include scripts we have now made the service available as a JavaScript include which is actually proving to be the most popular of the choices. Yesterday a final script was released giving users the option of including the Hijri Date as an image, using a mixture of GD and PHP. Demo:

This image development has a lot of potential but there is a server side problem which is slowing us down a little on development (lack of FreeType library). The Usayd Network has allowed us to test on their servers where we will continue to develop the script until the Younis Server Enterprise servers have FreeType enabled.

Future Aims

An aim that we feel is achievable is one that will hopefully be very appealing to users and this is the introduction of a wizard which gives you options which you can simply select a hit generate for your include. This is already visible on many websites which are offering simple services like this one in order to make it as user friendly as possible. Such a wizard would take a quite bit of hard work and if there is anyone interested in contributing please contact us. At the moment there is no time schedule for this but it has been given a high priority.

Netfirms have finally enabled mod_rewrite on their servers? Let me say that again. Netfirms have FINALLY enabled mod_rewrite on their servers?

Okay so your probably wondering why is that some kind of big deal? It’s just mod_rewrite, yeah you should expect to see that on every host but even so, you can live without it. Well, actually, thats not exactly true. Usayd Corp. moved their main website, Usayd Networks, to a different web host because frankly a WordPress site without structured permalinks (and other things) just looks unprofessional. I have literally requested Netfirms many many times to enable the rewrite engine and they always ignore me.

At the moment, we do not offer mod_rewrite. It has been added to our list of client requested features and may be included in a future service upgrade. Thank-you for your suggestion.

Funnily enough we just enabled the permalinks here on Younis Server Enterprise and guess what, it didn’t work. Strangely enough I did a simple mod rewrite test and that worked, so I emailed the wp-testers mailing list to see if they have any ideas.

Update

Yeah, got my hopes up - Netfirms are hopless. After a few emails and convincing that mod_rewrite doesn’t actually WORK (and explaining in detail why thanks to davidhouse) they responded:

Netfirms is aware of some issues with PHP variables as they are reported by our servers and are working on a way to have those issues resolved as soon as possible; however we do not have a time frame at this time.

Will keep you updated.

Update 27th July 06

Wow finally Netfirms updated their rubbish support pages to explain what you need to do to make permalinks work. After all that and it was just the /index.php/ rule!

Find it here

This Month

• New website

The Younis Server Enterprise releases the new website running on platforms WordPress for the major part of the site and Olate download for the download page. The website has been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 as of today.

• Projects

We have been working on offering services for people running websites, blogs or alike. One thing that we have been focusing on is enabling access to people using online services such as ‘Blogger’. The first service that has been released is the Hijri Date project which gives people the opportunity to easily include the Hijri Date on their websites. We have also added a link database to the Projects page so that users can test demonstrations of a variety of scripts, mainly PHP/AJAX.

• Downloads

Usayd Networks are now using YSE for their downloads which will enable us to keep track of how many downloads are taking place as well as making use of the new download section of YSE. There is quite a major factor for YSE which has seen an increase in visitors this year, but more importantly, a huge increase in bandwidth usage:



Amazingly January 06 for YSE witnessed a total Bandwidth for Month of 36 453.14 MB (36.5GB) which is more then the whole year for 2005. As far as we are concerned, that is a good sign!

Next Month

February will be quite a busy time for YSE, we are hoping on developing further scripts for the projects page as well as improving the existing ones. We are also working on improving the colour scheme for the website, a date has been scheduled for this.

We understand that there are many existing methods to calculate the Hijri Date, however we feel that there is no single source that exists for easy of use of the developer. We are focusing on PHP simply because of its open source nature, however we are looking for submissions of other methods such as Javascript, ASP(.net), C etc. Please try to submit your script to this project for the benefit of others.

We hope that this project will be the sign of more to come, and we also hope that you will make use of these resources in the best manner possible.

Check out the Hijri Date Project